Award Winning Designs

We design and install award winning Home Theaters for less than you might expect. This particular one won 'Best Home Theater Installation for under $75,000 at the CEDIA Electronic Lifestyle Awards.

Networking

The days of noisy dial-up connections and web browsers that came on CD-ROMs may be over, but if your home has an outdated router, you’re still living in the past. Homes today have an average of 8 devices connected to the Internet, and 84% of users stream videos and music, or play games online – all at the same time. However, a majority of homes still use old wireless router technology. It's no wonder many of us struggle with wireless performance issues.

A wireless router is now most commonly the internet connection hub of your home. Put simply wireless router delivers a single Internet connection to other devices on the network through either wired Ethernet or wireless connectivity.

Routers also often provide additional capabilities, such as USB ports for attaching an external drive or printer and then sharing those devices on a network; built-in firewalls to protect against Internet threats from invading a network; and services such as UPnP and DLNA to allow streaming multimedia content throughout the network.

Some Wi-Fi routers can also perform other tasks, such as allowing you to set up access for guests to connect to your wireless network and use your Internet service (without giving them access to resources like files and printers, or you can at least limit that access). You can also use a router's Quality of Service (QoS) feature to give priority to the type of network traffic most important to you, be it Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), video, or even file sharing.

So although a Wi-Fi router's main function is to deliver Internet (or WAN) access to your private network devices, it can do much more. Some can police what your children access on the Internet, and just about all can restrict which devices can connect to your network via a feature called MAC filtering.

Routers can vary from feature-heavy to simple. Some routers, targeted at novice users, are easy to set up, while others take a little more know-how. Routers also vary in the throughput they can crank out depending on the antenna configuration and the hardware inside.